‘The Great Divide’ review: Noah Kahan is allowed to be angry

Let it be said here and now that 2026 is the year Noah Kahan finally stopped being likable. Thank God.

Is The Great Divide a homecoming record? Sort of. But that would be about as accurate as calling Long Day’s Journey Into Night a family drama. It would be technically correct, yet structurally incomplete, missing the specific heat that makes the record burn.

Because what Noah Kahan has actually made, underneath the Dessner atmospherics and the Paul Simon name-checks we all keep reaching for, is a breakup album. A breakup album with a place. A breakup album with a person who is still alive and still answers the phone and still lives 20 minutes from the house Kahan grew up in. And once you hear it that way, the whole record reorganizes around a different center of gravity.

The prodigal son is furious in The Great Divide.

The thing that took me a minute to register about The Great Divide  is how angry it is. If you heard “The Great Divide” as a lead single back in January and assumed the album would sound like that — big chorus, big reach, big I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich magnanimity — you heard what Kahan and his label wanted you to hear, I suppose. It’s the most conventional song on the record and, predictably, already his highest-charting Hot 100 single. It plays like generosity. It plays like a man reaching across a distance to bless someone who hurt him deeply.

Listen to the whole album and the title track starts to feel like the one moment Kahan lets himself off the hook. The rest of the record is Kahan discovering that he has, at 29 years young, collected enough life-experience material and resentment and clarity to stop performing graciousness. The lead single exists to sell tickets. The album exists to settle something. Maybe a score.

Which is why starting with “End of August” feels like a deliberate reset. The opener gives you the quiet first. The haunting first. An everything you see out here will die first. Then the record does a wild turn, and the turn is violent.

“Doors” is the thesis statement.

I would argue, and I suspect the album is arguing, that “Doors” is the song the whole record pivots on. It’s the second track. It’s the one that tells you what Kahan has figured out about himself between Stick Season and now. The verse “I grew up pretendin’ sticks were little guns / I would point ’em at my dad, and he’d get mad / ‘Cause God forbid I hurt someone / I’d hurt anyone I could” is not the vulnerable-Vermont-kid Kahan his fans fell in love with. Not even close. That Kahan was always apologizing for being sad. This Kahan is apologizing for being dangerous.

“I’m the trouble ahead, and I scream in my sleep / You put your money on red, I’m a sure bet at a losin’ streak / I keep showin’ you doors, but you can’t open them up / ‘Cause it gets harder to see me the closer you try to look.”

Let’s keep coming back to “I keep showin’ you doors.” That’s a man explaining his own cruelty as a kind of offered mercy. That’s a man saying: I tried to warn you. Every song that follows lives inside of that warning.

What “Haircut” does to its subject.

The fight at the center of The Great Divide is with someone who left the small town first. Someone who got famous in an adjacent register, who went to New York. Who “got bored of the New Hampshire space” and “left us for the New York Times.” Someone who now wears sandalwood beads and cries on live TV and talks like Jesus Christ. The album is clearest about this on “Haircut” and “Dashboard.” As these are the two songs that play like the same fight happening in two different rooms.

“Haircut” is the nastier one. And I mean that as a compliment. It contains the line that stopped me cold on first listen: “You walked into a haunted house and got angry at the ghosts.” There is an entire thesis about processing trauma in that line. There is also a very specific accusation. The person being addressed has confused the act of public suffering with the act of actually doing the work. And Kahan — who has spent his whole career being forgiven for exactly this mistake — has decided he gets to be the one calling it out.

“I’m happy for your haircut, I’m glad you got your act clean / You’re showin’ up like bad news and leavin’ like a bad dream.” The generosity is Kahan’s weapon. The blessing is his blade.

“Dashboard” and the limits of self-work.

If “Haircut” is the diss track, “Dashboard” is the autopsy. It’s maybe the sharpest Kahan has ever been as a writer. And also the most unkind. “Look at you go, crossing state lines with your shadow / Tryna run away, change your zip code / Turns out that you’re still an asshole.” Then, later, twisting the knife: “It ain’t our fault that you aren’t suddenly somebody else / ‘Cause you’ve worked on yourself, got a dog / You’re an asshole after all.”

It’s worth turning that couplet over a few times. Because here is a songwriter whose entire appeal, whose whole commercial proposition and Busyhead Project, rests on the premise that self-work matters. That therapy matters and getting better is possible. And on “Dashboard” he sings, with real venom, the heretical counter-thesis. Sometimes people work on themselves and get a dog and stay assholes. Sometimes the Devil shows up on your dashboard yet again.

Which is probably why the song that comes next is called “23.” It’s about addiction. And yeah, we’ll get to that later.

The women writing back.

One of the real shifts from Stick Season to The Great Divide is that the women in Kahan’s songs have started talking. On Stick Season, they were mostly absences. People he called drunk, people he couldn’t let go. People who lived in memory. On The Great Divide, they show up with fully-realized opinions.

“Porch Light,” the second single, writes from Kahan’s mother’s perspective. This is a remarkable move for a songwriter whose career has depended on mining his family for material. and whose mother, by his own account in recent interviews, let him know through a text message that a joke he made about her divorce onstage had hurt her feelings.

The song, then, is an act of reparation that doubles as an act of ventriloquism. “You act like we just sit up here and wait for you to reappear / But, baby, there are bills to pay and your dad’s road needs salt.” The mother speaking here has been carrying a full life Kahan has been too busy being famous to see.

“We Go Way Back” gives the same corrective treatment to his wife, Brenna. “Saw the world from up close, it ain’t much to look at / Compared to you in your work clothes, waving hello from the driveway.” That one arguably lands as the album’s true moment of grace.

“23” is the song that breaks everything.

I have listened to “23” maybe ten times since the album dropped and I still don’t know how to write about it cleanly. It’s addressed, by Kahan’s own framing in his Apple Music commentary, not to a specific person in his life but to a composite — a brother figure, a sibling-shaped hole, the person you hoped someone would stay being.

The chorus — “if I never see you again / And you could be anything I want / Twenty-three, clean in the engine heat / Teaching me how the thing runs” — is about the math of wishing someone would die so they can stay the version of them you loved.

That is a terrible thing to sing, isn’t it? It’s also one of the more honest things someone has sung about addiction and family and the way grief begins its work long before the person is actually gone. “Tattooed your initials into my right arm / So I’d see your name when I lift up a drink.” You can hear Kahan realize, mid-song, that he has been grieving someone who is still alive. And that the grief has its own momentum now. There might be a version of love that consists entirely of hoping the person you love stays far enough away to remain lovable.

“Won’t you stay gone?” he asks the chorus out. It’s the album’s cruelest line and its most tender one. They’re also the same line.

What the 17 tracks are actually doing.

The easiest complaint to make about The Great Divide is that the album is too long. 17 tracks. 70 minutes. The mid-album run — “Spoiled,” “Headed North,” “We Go Way Back” — sags, at least to some degree. Mainly because the songs sound too much alike.

But it’s easy to push back on this. The mid-album stretch is a breather of sorts. It’s here where Kahan stops fighting for a minute. “Headed North” is a goofy, warm, almost comic song. The Cybertruck line, the “coexistence” sticker, the tossed-off outro (“Should we keep it with the fuck up in there?”). “Spoiled” is Kahan imagining his unborn children, their inherited ease. The way they will resent him for being tired the way he resents his dad. “We Go Way Back” is the love song to his wife.

These three songs together form the album’s emotional exhale. They’re the evidence that the anger on “Haircut” and “Dashboard” and “Doors” is coming from someone who has something to lose. Cut them — make the record twelve tracks, make it sixty minutes, make it the tight version most people expect — and you lose the architecture of the thing. You’re left with an album that sounds like a man yelling without ever showing you what he’s yelling for.

“All Them Horses” is the best song Kahan has ever written.

I will take this fight with anyone. “All Them Horses” is the best song Kahan has ever written, and I think the album knows it. Which is why it lives at track 16. Right before the finale, positioned as a kind of emotional last-will-and-testament before “Dan” brings the whole thing home.

The song builds around the 2023 Vermont floods, which devastated the Upper Valley while Kahan was on tour. “See the dried flood lines on the neighbors’ porches / Do you remember cryin’ for all them horses? / They did not look scared at all, they did not look scared.” It’s a song about survivor’s guilt rewritten as a song about class betrayal. About what happens when your hometown gets hit with a disaster and you process it from a window seat in a 90s plane.

“I’m a sidewalk preacher with a record deal / I’m the weight of new sneakers on some dead wood.” This is Kahan writing the line a lesser songwriter would have spent a whole album trying to get to. It’s the whole record in one image. Of guilt returning to ground that remembers being walked on lightly. And now it has to hold your actual grown weight.

“This ain’t mine anymore,” he sings. “I made too much goddamn noise.” That is what the album is truly about. That is what it has been about the whole time.

“Dan” and the real divide.

The closer is a love song to a man. That’s not to say “Dan” is a queer song, and reading it that way flattens what’s actually happening in it. But it is a song written in a register American pop-country almost never uses. In that it’s tender, unromantic, adult love between two straight men who have known each other since childhood. And who will almost certainly vote for different people in November.

The chorus is basically famous already. “I’m with my best friend Dan now, campin’ on the county line / Hand around a Miller Lite, waitin’ for the sun to rise / Couple of hometown heroes fightin’ over politics / Sittin’ and rememberin’, young men from different sides.”

Obviously, the political half of this song stays vague. Some will receive that choice harshly. Others will be generous. I think the vagueness is the point, though. I think “Dan” is an honest admission that Kahan does not know how to reach his best friend across the political divide. Maybe to him, refusing to name the divide is itself a form of love. A choice to be with Dan in the way Dan can be met. Under the violet sky, with a Miller Lite, watching the wasps drown.

Yes, it’s cowardly. In a way. But it’s also what most friendships between adult men in this country look like in 2026.

Where this leaves Kahan.

The big, obvious thing to say about The Great Divide is that it’s a solid follow-up. The discourse will continue to be about whether Aaron Dessner has become too omnipresent in the production of literary-minded pop albums. And whether Kahan has earned his place next to Isbell and Springsteen. Whether 17 tracks was too many. And so on and so on.

The album I heard is stranger and meaner than that discourse has registered thus far. It’s a record about what happens after the homecoming. After the documentary crew leaves, after the Fenway shows, after the Grammy nomination turns out to be the last Grammy nomination for a while. It’s a record about discovering that fame can’t cure you. It’s a record about discovering you never deserved to be cured. Because the person you were angry at the whole time was also you.

Kahan has made the album his most loyal fans will need time to accept. He has made an album that says the therapy-kid worldview on which his entire career was built has limits. He has made an album that hopes people he loves stay gone. And calls people he loves assholes. That blesses people he loves in the same breath it flays them. And he has made it sound, for long stretches, genuinely beautiful.

The ceiling on what this kind of career can become just got a lot higher. The likeability gap is a small price to pay.

The Great Divide is available now.

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Images courtesy of Mercury Records.